The neglected geography of human pathogens and diseases

To the Editor — As highlighted in the Feature article ‘Predicting zoonoses’ in the April issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution1 , the emergence of new viruses presents many challenges to humanity, including predicting outbreaks of diseases we don’t even know about yet. The featured PREDICT1 project is a welcome step forward with regards to finding the world’s unknown viruses. Yet, amidst the focus on newly emerging diseases such as Zika and avian influenza, an even more consequential, albeit less headline-grabbing, challenge is being missed: we know little about the geographical distribution of the vast majority of ‘older’ human pathogens that collectively kill millions of people each year, much less how such distributions will change given global changes in climate, land-use and economy (...)